Out there in the furniture world today furniture designers are cranking out coffee table after coffee table. They’ve got designer glass coffee tables, wooden coffee tables, metal coffee tables, square coffee tables, round coffee tables, lift-top coffee tables, and all different kinds of coffee tables to fill each and every room of your home.
The only problem is none of these furniture designs will have a quality all their own. They have all been mass produced and at least a hundred or more different people around the United States own each one of them. You can’t be unique in this industrial age. This is why it is often necessary and always fun to hand craft your own personal coffee table for one of the rooms in your house.
Hand crafted furniture is a great pet project style hobby. Once you’ve gotten the hang of building a table here or a corner bookcase there, all other furniture starts to look easy. Coffee tables are petite tables that sit low to the ground in front of the sofa and normally don’t have many parts. You could try building one for your kid’s playroom and have them paint it with finger paints. That would add unforgettable charm to a young child’s room and you would get a one of a kind keepsake.
Furniture building is never entirely easy though. You have to kind of know your way around some different tools. In order to build a coffee table you have to be able to use a saw, understand how to measure widths and lengths and angles, and you’ll need to be able to see the finished piece in your mind before you even get working on it.
There are three basic steps to hand crafting a coffee table, we won’t get much into the details here because this medium doesn’t allow for that, but the idea is simple: Design it, Gather it, Construct it. Three steps with simple concepts.
The first stage is the design stage. You want to figure out which room the coffee table is going to sit in first and then you want to decide how the table will look. When coming up with designs keep in mind the general feel of the décor before making a decision. You don’t want to design a bright yellow and pink polka-dotted coffee table for a calm earthy den.
Next you must gather the materials. Figure out how big you want the coffee table to be and decide what kind of wood you want to use to build it. Once you know all that go to your local hardware store and have the wood cut out for you.